Don't Get Weird On Me, Babe: Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

I don't know about Animal Crossing in general but Pocket Camp is weird. It emblematizes cultural drift. Could something like this have existed in the mid or late twentieth century? I doubt it.

In great part, ACPC relies on and resides in the hinterland between maturity and childhood. It looks absolutely like a game designed for children. Quite small children. It doesn't read like one.

We're in a nervous neighborhood, as evidenced by the appearance of the anxious query "is Animal Crossing for adults?", tenth in Google's suggestions on how a sentence beginning "Is Animal Crossing..."might end. That's the generic Animal Crossing, though. If you rephrase the question to refer specifically to Pocket Camp the suggestion vanishes. Seems it's a question no-one's asking.

Pocket Camp is the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. Ars Technica's glowing review of New Horizons complains that "the series' identity has been sullied in recent years by the smartphone-only spinoff Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp", suggesting those of us who have only seen the mobile version might even "assume the Animal Crossing series is a cheap Farmville clone".

Of course, to do that I'd first have to have played Farmville, or at least have a much clearer idea of what it is. Did it have narcissists, fantasists and super-annuated extras from Easy Rider as mainstays of its cast? Did it exist to blur the boundaries of the real and irreal?

I like to play Pocket Camp right before I go to sleep, which often means midnight or later. Some of the animals in the campsite comment on the lateness of the hour. They allude to night-time activities that they and I might prefer to keep hidden. They express mild concern over why I might be up so late.

Yet there they always are. Juggling, reading, chatting. Night never falls on our shared world. It's always bright as noon. Their surprise at my nocturnal presence might equally be my own at their eternal wakefulness.

The private lives of these animals are a mystery. I'm not always sure even of their species. It is, I'm thinking, something about which one shouldn't ask.

There are many questions better left unspoken. To ask why a penguin, if that's what Tex is, should be both a football letterman and an enthusiast for the revival of dead languages would take Pocket Camp into areas I feel ill-qualified to enter. It's necessary to accept these situations.

Some of my animal friends maintain a certain consistency. Rosie is determined she's a star. Apollo knows he's old. Tex's speech in favor of bringing back Latin, however, turned up a few days later in the mouth of someone else, word for word.

What does that mean? I think of Californium, sometimes. Are we inside the children's novel Philip K Dick never wrote?

There's a queasy lurch to some of the conversations. Animal Crossing is a safe place, we all know that, but is it? Is it really? Do you want to imagine Rosie in a leather jumpsuit? Like Suzy Quatro, perhaps? Or Joan Jett? Or Kathy Rain? And should you, if you do?

She didn't really say it, did she? Someone put those words in her mouth. Is there a leather jumpsuit in the game? Is this a marketing suggestion? Or is it someone having fun? And at whose expense?

Apollo was the first animal to join my crew. He all but invited himself. I wasn't sure at first but now he's a fixture. I wouldn't know the place without his passive-aggressive bark and self-deprecating sense of humor.

He has a lot of lines. Last night I upgraded my cool tent to level three and he launched into a multi-screen soliloquy on the joy of the open road. It was worthy of Lana's intro to Ride, or at least a bar band cover of  Steppenwolf.

Was it the way we were dressed? Or the cool factor of the level three tent? Or was Apollo just having a mid-life crisis, like all his others?

He's an eagle with barely-suppressed anger issues, an odd combination of self-doubt and arrogance. Rosie's a narcissist, possibly delusional. Goldie, as we have already established, is agarophobic. Eugene seems to think he's The Fonz. Tia believes inanimate objects can be friends, although not with her. Freya is perhaps the most normal of campers, although even she seems dangerously brittle some days...

I'm thinking of Phil Dick again. Clans of the Alphane Moon, specifically.

Last night I dinged level 22. There are eight animals camping with me, the most the campsite can hold.

I checked today. The game currently has at least one hundred and fifty levels and there are one hundred and ninety-one animals.

I think I need to sit quietly and think this through. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is weird. And it's not about to stop.

In The Days Of Perky Pat

I'd finished cropping some screenshots for a follow-up post to Wednesday's "Working With Fire And Steel". I was ready to write but it felt too quiet in the room. The ambient sound of passing cars. Occasional birdsong. Oppressive.

I opened YouTube. I have it configured always to open on my subscriptions. Most days it's a sea of yellow/turquoise banners from Elefant Records, occasionally interspersed with Ardwulf unboxing something or the latest burst of PR static from Poppy.

Ah, Poppy. I may be over Poppy, by the way, in case you were wondering. There was a time, not that long ago, when I seriously considered buying and wearing a pin so other members of the church of her poisoned mind could recognize me. Quite glad I didn't do that.

She's free of outside influence now, reportedly, taking things in the direction of her choice. Her new path leads her away from the glitched hyperreality of post-postmodernism towards the studded leather uplands of pop-metal. I think I'll pass.

Not Poppy, then. My gaze shifted to the latest drifting dream fix from my enablers at Elefant: La Bien Querida feat. Los Planetas with their new single Domingo Escarlata. (Do we say "single" any more? I doubt it).

Elefant Records runs out of Madrid, Spain. Many of their acts map the Spanish diaspora, although you might not realize it from that anglocenteric Wikipedia list. Now, my Spanish is not good. Tourist Spanish plus. I can read some, though. I studied Latin, the key to any romance language, and I know French. One romantic tongue is much like another, on the page. I at least know enough to translate "Scarlet Sunday".

And look, more of those tropes I love so much; a color and the one day of the week I favor so strongly I once wrote a song about it. I called it "Everything's Sunday" because I wished it was.  There's even a visual trigger in the thumbnail - red hair. I have a lot of triggers.

But I was not prepared for this:

Watch and wallow. That's pop perfection, that's what that is. I wrote a whole, elegaic paean of praise to its drifting, mesmeric beauty in the draft that was lost. Oh, did I not mention that? I wrote this post and then lost it right at the end. Don't you hate when that happens?

I don't think I'll try to recreate it. Just watch the damn movie, alright? And I do mean watch, not just listen. Because, glorious though the music is, it's the images that carry the weight. That drugdealer opening under the bleak bridge. The vials. And the blue. All that blue. Her fingers in the soft wool's warp. Oh my. Oh my. Continuará. I hope so. I really hope so.

And, look, the timeslips, the juddering. Books skittering on shelves. The telephone changing form. Isn't it the game I was playing and posting about just a few weeks back? Californium. Yes. Yes it is.

It's all pure Philip K Dick. Unless it's just me. I read a lot of Philip K Dick at an impressionable age. I was ahead of the curve, an early adopter. I see his influence everywhere, have done for decades. Now it's his vision we all see, coming clear around us.

If I don't see you again I won't understand
Because life showed me that you existed
And all hope I'll lose
My sky will cloud, the seas will dry up, alas!

If I don't see you again, if I don't see you again
For I want nothing, if I don't know what to do
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine

If I don't see you again I will die of grief
From black sorrow I die because I can't see you
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine 

How Kabiria Films or Ana Fernández-Villaverde herself, whoever took the lead, made the leap from these sad love song lyrics, rendered into English with surprising feel by Google Translate, to that saturated, entropic feverscape... well, it beats me. I'm just so glad they did.

Elefant Records, like me, have history with Philip K Dick, it seems. I already had another of their roster earmarked for a post I've been marinating on music inspired by the great man. But why sit on it? These aren't times to wait. Let's have it now.

There's no mystery hanging over the provenance of this one. La Monja Enana lifted the title wholesale from a Dick story first published in 1963. All they've changed is the language: Los Dias de Perky Pat.

There's a squelchier version I much prefer but it doesn't have a performance to give it visual heft. The real kicker, though, is the lyric.

A few years after the short story The Days of Perky Pat appeared in Amazing. Dick reworked the premise for one of his greatest novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the lyrics, Ana Vaquero and Juan Alonso twist that narrative once again, to their own purpose.

I don't know what made me accept the transfer to Mars
A higher salary, an exciting destination
It was my great chance to get away from Earth
I wanted to start again, make a blur and a new account
And it is that in advertising everything was so beautiful
A natural paradise, how have I been so lingering?
The air doesn't smell the same, the sun shines without force
I can't take another day, I'm going to lose my mind
At night, in the neighborhood, none of this matters
Everything is solved by taking a dose of soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
I'm not going to work anymore, I spend the day locked up
Next to Perky Pat, in a more human world
But I begin to suspect that nothing is what it seems
Everything around me trembles and fades
I don't care about the time, none of this matters anymore
Everything is solved by taking a little more soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
And I no longer want to distinguish the real from the unreal
It's so much better like this, living with Perky Pat 

This is where I lose out, not speaking the language. Google does its best but falters. Worse, the tension between the bouyancy of the music and the desperation of the words is lost. Even so, though, eh? Even so... 

I won't point out the synergies and synchronicities between those lyrics and our current situation. Oh, I just did. I'm sorry about that.

Third, because good things always come in threes and bad things too, there's this, about which I can find nothing. The song has the same title and it sounds quite similar, really quite very similar, although I can't convince myself it's a cover.

The lyric is in English but I can't make it out. Comments on the thread are blocked and the band seem to have no internet presence whatsoever.

How very Philip K.

Transmitting Live From Mars

According to Steam it took me exactly five hours to complete Californium. That seems remarkably precise. It's also remarkably slow compared to most people who've finished the game, at least according to some of the "mostly positive" reviews, where three hours would seem closer to the norm.

I like to take my time, look up, smell the rosewater. Also, finding some of those glitches wasn't as easy as all that. Mostly I managed it on my own but I'm very glad someone took the time to record a full playthrough for the handful of times my search threatened to stretch from fun to frustration.

So... was Californium any good?

At just over £5.00 for exactly five hours play I thought it was reasonable value as entertainment goes. A little less expensive than the average movie, a little more than a medium-length novel. If I'd paid for it with my own money I wouldn't feel short-changed.

It doesn't have a great deal of replayabilty although I guess, technically, it has as much as any Philip K. Dick novel, in that both tell a linear story with multiple possible interpretations. I've re-read most of PKD's novels, though, some of them many times; I can't see myself playing through Californium again.

The game's greates strength is its aesthetic, which is rigourously and successfully maintained throughout. I never once tired of looking at it. Indeed, at one point I wondered what it might feel like to "play" the game without playing it.

There's a mysterious voice that occasionally chides the protaganist, Elvin Green, for his apparent inability to know when he's well off. As Elvin peels away the layers of reality, finding a less satisfactory version each time, the voice suggests, with reason, that Elvin doesn't know when to stop.

And in fact each iteration begins by putting him in a better place. He starts as a failing writer, behind on his assignments, whose publisher is about to "let him go". In the second chapter he's much more successful, feted as the "Patriot Writer", the biographer of Abe Lincoln. When he tears the veil and steps through yet again, he becomes the political leader of an entire planet, or at least the boss of a mining colony on Mars.

It's only when he starts pulling at the threads that everything unravels, always leaving him in a worse situation than when he began. He has a very nice apartment, which gets nicer each time, and it occured to me that, as a player, I could refuse to engage with the process, let the glitches glitch, just log in to spend a few minutes staring out of the window at the scenery. It's nice scenery. Elvin doesn't appreciate it but I did.

But no, we all have to do our part. So I worked through all of the chapters, saw all the changes, spoke to all the people... or not. I thought I had but the game has Achievements (because of course it does or it wouldn't be a game, apparently...) and one of them is Speak to Every NPC. And I didn't get it.

So I missed someone. I have no idea who. I spoke to everyone I saw because the writing is not bad and the voice acting is a bit better than that so I wanted to. Also you never know when a Philip K Dick reference might pop up.

I thought about that, too. Californium is a game predicated on a knowledge of or an interest in the works of a particular author. Thematically it does a fair job of evoking a few of the great man's better-known tropes. It also drops in the odd reference that seems to have no function other than to give the player warm fuzzies of recognition.

Is that Fan Service? If it is, is that a bad thing? What's wrong with servicing the fans, anyway? If you weren't a fan of Philip K Dick, would you be playing at all? I know it's why I bought the game.

Even when the references seemed to be crowbarred in (and there were only a handful that I spotted) I appreciated them. Would I rather the developers had taken their own game more seriously and resisted temptation? No, I don't think I would. I'm a fan. Serve me.

The final chapter, in which reality comes unglued along with physics and topology, was probably the best part of the game as a game. It was also the part with the least story. I do still struggle with the interface between those concepts. I've seen Californium referred to as both a "walking simulator" and a "puzzle game" and it is both of those things, although the walks are very short and the puzzles mostly easy.

I was satisified with it as a "game" but I'm easily satisfied on that front. I was a lot less staisfied with it as a story, largely because of the ending. It was all going rather well until then.

I'm not going to say the ending was bad. It might have been. There's one interpretation - and it was the first one I came to - that, if true, would make it a very bad ending indeed. One of the worst kinds of ending, in fact. But I'm very far from sure that was the ending.

Or the meaning of the ending, anyway. It was definitely the ending of the game in a practical sense; everything stopped and there were credits. Whether what had happened was what I first thought had happened, though, I somewhat doubt.

In which case I didn't understand the ending. That's not great, either, although it might be my problem. Or it might not. Maybe it wasn't as clear as it should have been.

Or maybe that was the point. Maybe it was clever Dickery, a touch of postmodernist humor. Maybe it wasn't supposed to make sense because, y'know, reality isn't what you think. If you can understand it you've misunderstood it. Except I've read, as I mentioned, an awful lot of Philip K Dick and I never once got to the end of a novel and found myself thinking "what was that all about?". Granted, I still haven't read Valis, let alone The Divine Invasion, but the point holds.

Would I recommend Californium? For PKD fans and sympathizers, yes, definitely. I felt it was five hours well spent. I enjoyed it. I strongly suspect it isn't anything like as smart as the creators probably imagine it is but it's certainly smart enough. It doesn't disgrace its source material and that's a lot more than not nothing.

For anyone who hasn't read Dick, I'm less sure. I'd say about a quarter to a third of my enjoyment came from resonances the game kicked up, stuff I remembered from the novels and short stories. Half was from the look of the thing and the rest from the voice acting and the narrative. Whether that's enough for someone unfamiliar with the original texts is questionable.

But, as I said, who else is going to be interested? Probably not a problem.

According to the best review of the game I read, everything Californium does right the much better-known and vastly more successful The Stanley Parable did better. Maybe I should try that next.

Real To Irreal : Californium

For once, I did exactly what I said I was going to do. After I finished blogging yesterday I popped off to Steam to buy Californium.

Not! Of course I didn't. As soon as I hit "Publish" I forgot all about it and spent several hours futzing around in EverQuest II .

It wasn't until late in the evening that I remembered and finally went and did it. By then I only had time for a quick look. I played for about forty-five minutes. This morning I logged in again and played for a couple of hours.

That's not enough for a full review but it's plenty for a First Impresions piece. And my first impressions are very favorable.

Let's start with the best part: the art design. It's gorgeous. I've taken over fifty screenshots already. I'm seriously considering grabbing several hundred just so I can use them for randomized desktop backgrounds.

It's a good thing the art's as well done as it is because the game relies on it extremely heavily for gameplay, which consists entirely of spotting anomalies, while the narative relies almost equally strongly on visual contextual disparity. Some weight is carried by the soundscape but it's down to the art department to handle the heavy lifting.

The controls are just about the most minimal I've ever seen in a game. WASD for movement and left mouse button to interact. That's it. Oh, and sometimes you have to type the words you see on screen in a simulation of typing on a typewriter, which is how the game begins.

Absolutely nothing is explained extrinsically. You're left to work out for yourself what to do by context. It's not difficult because there are only a tiny handful of things you can do. You can walk around and look at things - and by "look at" I mean you, the player, can stare at the image on your monitor. Your character, a writer named Elvin, who analogs Dick himself, can't perform any of the typical adventure game tricks - no examining things, no picking things up, no interaction of any kind.

Except when you see something glitch. This, I think, is where the game really earns its right to invoke the name-recognition of PKD. All the gameplay I've seen so far consists entirely of noticing something that's not right and looking closely at it. That's something that drives the narrative in many of Dick's novels and here it's replicated beautifully.

Reality is not what it seems. As you pan the camera maybe something will flicker and catch your eye. Perhaps you'll notice objects juddering or changing place. There might be a glow where no obvious light source exists.

When you spot one of these you'll notice an icon. Left-click on it and hold and reality will change, overwriting the late-summer light of Summer of Love era California with a colder, bluer, altogether more 1950s aesthetic.

I wandered about, looking for glitches, opening holes in reality, listening to the rather good soundtrack. Once the phone rang and I listened to a message from Elvin's publisher. He didn't seem very pleased with his work. Then the television sputtered into life and started talking to me. When the static cleared all it showed were roman numerals. They turned out to be a countdown of the glitches I needed to find before I could move on to the next stage.

Eventually I found all the tears in reality and pulled them open. That in turn unlocked the door to my apartment. I moved outside to do the same in the street, the yard, my publisher's office, the local diner...

And that's all there is to it. Oh, except for talking to people. Listening, I should say. Elvin doesn't speak. He listens. And listening is a pleasure because the voice acting is very good. Up to radio drama standard, very nearly.

Once you leave the apartment you get to meet all kinds of folk; hippies, policeman, federal agents, store owners, draft dodgers. They stand around in the form of cardboard cut-outs, something that has a particularly Dickian resonance, although I think it's just a visual trope not a representation of how your character perceives them. Although, just as in a Dick novel, you can't quite be sure...

Californium claims to take its inspiration from both the life and the work of Philip K. Dick, which is why I was interested in playing it. From what I've seen so far it fulfills that promise quite convincingly although not everyone agrees.

Perhaps the author of that piece was insufficiently "familiar with obscure biographical facts from Dick's life", as he suggests players need to be if they're to get the most out of the game. Having read more than one biography of the great man as well as most of his non-SF works, several of which are semi-autobiographical, I thought it made a pretty fair fist of getting the existential nuances right, which is the hard part. Homicidal androids and funny talking doors, well, any game can manage those.

As for the plot, it's too early to say. There seems to be one. In the hippie reality Elvin has writer's block and his wife has walked out; in fifties fascist world he's a respected Patriot Writer but his wife, the same wife, now estranged, has just been arrested for terrorism. There's a third reality starting to open up. I don't know what that's going to be. But I'm curious to find out.

Clearly I'm enjoying myself so far but Californium does have its problems, the biggest one being an inability to save your progress when you'd like. You have to complete each level (the game actually calls them "levels") to have your gamestate retained at that point. If you quit before then, when you next log in you'll have to begin again from the start of the last level you didn't finish.

That's hardly conducive to natural play, particularly since it's far from clear when a "level" has ended. The television sets scattered around the locations keep a tally of how many glitches you've uncovered but sometimes there's more than one TV on the go.

Spotting the glitches can be quite challenging, too. They vary a fair bit in how they appear. The ones I find most convincing reveal themselves by some movement or lighting effect but others only show themselves momentarily as you pan the camera, emulating the sensation of catching sight of something out of the corner of your eye. They can be hard to spot. 

Then there are those that only appear when you mouse over them. Some only appear when you mouse over them while Elvin is moving. Some are concealed behind behind furniture, which glitches to reveal them, then covers them again. It's immersive when it works but frustrating when you've been wandering around for ten minutes without spotting anything.

That's adventure games all over, though. Which is why I always resort to a walkthrough in time of need. I'm playing to enjoy myself not to raise my blood pressure. 

I made it about two hours in before I got completely stuck. Fortunately there is a full walkthrough on Steam. It's in video form but given the nature of the game that makes sense. It means you could also watch it like a movie if you wanted. 

I might end up doing that but I think it's more likely I'll play all the way through. The way the layers of reality peel back is intriguing. I'd like to find out what's at the core. And I want to know who the sarcastic guy is who keeps talking down to me through the TV. And punch him in the throat.

A Secret Love Of Chaos

This post is something of a hymn to serendipty or the butterfly effect or maybe just the way one things leads to another. I can't really remember how it started even though I only began planning it a week or so ago.

I know I was thinking it was about time I did another music post, not so much because I imagined anyone wanted one but because I really enjoy doing them and it would be a fun thing to do on my week off work.

What peg to hang it on, though? With nothing much in mind I started thumbing through cover versions on YouTube, where I chanced upon a sliver of diamond:

Not only is it one of the most awe-inspiring JAMC covers I've ever heard (and I've heard a few) but the band is called The Caulfield Sisters. Now, I guess that could be a co-incidence but not when you consider this:

Back when I used to write and publish apazines, I had an occasional series where I would review books I'd found. Just the ones whose cover copy or blurb proclaimed them to be the spiritual successors of Catcher In The Rye in particular or J. D . Salinger in general. I hunted for them and found quite a few.

I wrote in the persona of an unnamed, ethereal entity, trapped unwillingly in an empty house on some transcendental plane. These texts would mysteriously appear for her; her only form of amusement or entertainment, her only relief from the close, unending stasis of her afterlife. She reviewed them for me. What else was there for her to do?

I never came right out and said it but it wasn't hard to work out that the girl in question was the spirit, the ghost, the transdimensional echo of Phoebe Caulfield, Holden's little sister. The fact that I used to publish my zines under the rubric "Another fit from The House of Phoebe" made the connection hard to miss.

I was in my twenties. Bite me. 

Three or four decades later I'm afraid to say I still think that was a cool set up. "Catcher In The Rye" is still my favorite novel and Salinger still my favorite writer, closely followed by "The Bell Jar" and Sylvia Plath in either second or third place depending on my mood. Yes, I am familiar with the term "arrested development", thank you very much. Good band, too.

I watched a bunch more videos by The Caulfield Sisters and I liked them so much I bought the MP3 album. Then I spent several hours bumming around YouTube trying to find enough Salinger-related tunes to put a post together.

It turns out a lot of people write songs about Salinger and Holden Caulfield and most of them aren't any good at all. Who'd have guessed? Well, I should have, for one. After all, I'm the idiot who bought a CD just because it was called "J.D. Salinger" and it was by a band called "The Wynona Riders". I mean, it had to be great, didn't it? Judge for yourself.

I did manage to find a couple of gems. Well, "gems" is pushing it. Songs that don't totally suck, that would be closer.

The one above has a superb title - "You're Not Salinger. Get Over It" and it's a good mosh pit filler. The band also get points for naming themselves after a somewhat Salingeresque and almost equally fondly-remembered T.V. show - The Wonder Years. Unfortunately, although there are literally dozens of live versions out there, every one of them seems to have been filmed from said mosh pit on a phone and they're all pretty damn close to unlistenable.

Maybe it's better not to get too carried away by a band's name. I certainly wasn't expecting much from an outfit calling themselves Retrospective Soundtrack Players. I mean, what even is that? But this is a pretty good tune and a creditable attempt to embody the spirit - and even the plot - of Catcher in a four minute pop song. Extra credit for wearing the Holden Caulfield hat!

While we're on the subject of band names that don't inspire confidence, give a thought to The New Hampshire Love Song Warriors, which actually sounds like one guy and a piano. The title, "I Want a Cornish Girl (& To Live Like JD Salinger)", misled me at first. I was wondering how Cornwall came into it but it turns out Cornish is a town in New Hampshire. 

The whole idea of a post based around popular songs based on Salinger and his works wasn't really going anywhere so I put it to one side. Then Everett True just happened to put up this about Grrrl Gang, a C86-obsessed trio from Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Everett seemed surprised and delighted that twentysomethings in Indonesia would be obsessed with Heavenly and Talulah Gosh but from what I've seen online there's a big twee/indie scene in that part of the world.

Grrrl Gang are excellent, as I found when I flipped through their back catalog, where one of the first things I came across was the provocatively titled Guys Don't Read Sylvia Plath (patently untrue although maybe not in Indonesia).

That put me back on the trail of author-inspired songs I could hang a blog post on. It occured to me immediately that the names of certain authors would be far more prone to theft or inspiration than others. I didn't think there was much chance of my finding some of my favorites - Ysabeau Wilce, say, or Robert B Parker - immortalized in song. And I was right.

I thought I might get a result with another of my top three all-time favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but no such luck. My search wasn't helped by some prat called Scott Fitzgerald, who represented the U.K. at the 1988 Eurovision song contest. And came second. By one point. To Celine Dion. Singing for Switzerland. I'm not making this up. I wish I was.

Zelda Fitzgerald, however, is a different story. Unsurprisingly, her doomed, desperate grandeur still resonates down the years. Maybe one day I'll read her only published novel, Save Me The Waltz. If I don't, God knows it won't be for lack of trying. I must have started it half a dozen times.

Whereas I think most of the authors mentioned in this post would be either mortified or driven to homicidal rage by the songs bearing their names, I suspect Zelda would have enjoyed this one, if only for what has to be the most hipster video I've ever seen. The Fitzgeralds had a lot of hipster in them.

That was My Kind Of Karma. Well, it wasn't. It really wasn't. That's just what they call themselves. Bands, eh? Hipsters, eh? What are they like?

Much safer to dress down and name yourself after a children's T.V. show. It worked for Belle and Sebastian. I love them, even if they are the indie equivalent of National Treasures. When I saw they'd namechecked Sylvia Plath (yes, we're back to her again) I knew we were in safe hands.

Not sure about that keytar though. Or the hat.

If Belle and Sebastian and Sylvia Plath seem like a natural fit, this next one comes from somewhere to the left of left field. (Not Leftfield. I don't think they ever worked a quote from The Bell Jar into their prog house/trip hop ouevre). 

That said, rap and Plath's poetry share considerable common ground. I wish there was a completed version of this on YouTube. And I wish it was Ted Hughes chanting "You may be crazy but I love you baby". I'd pay good money for that.

Another obvious candidate for lionization in song is Jack Kerouac. Any of the beats, really. I've never been a big fan. I did read most of On The Road but that's about it. And I never quite finished it.

I also never got far with 10,000 Maniacs. On paper they're the kind of thing I ought to like and I do, a bit. Just not all that much. This is good, though. I wonder if it was her idea to start with the reading? She seems quite uncomfortable about it.

Sonically, I prefer the next one, by Madrugadas, which means "early mornings" in Spanish according to Google Translate. I have no clue what it's about but it's called "Kerouac". It sounds like three songs stuck together and I'm not convinced the last one is even supposed to be there.

Which brings us to our finale. When I was a teenager, before I discovered Salinger, Fitzgerald and being pretentious, my favorite author was Philip K. Dick. He's still in the top five. Or thereabouts.

I took a punt on his name turning up in a few song titles and boy, was I right! He would have hated it. He liked classical music, mostly; a bit of jazz. Maybe The Beatles at a push.

Some of the horrors perpetrated in his name would have appalled him, I'm sure, and this, by the oddly-named Barn Owl, in particular. Perhaps he'd have been mollified by their evident close reading of the text. Dick in later life believed a number of unusual things, including that history ended in 50 AD, everything since being a simulacrum. The title of this one is "Philip K. Dick's Nightmare (The Roman Empire Never Ended)" and you can't say fairer than that.

It's a good title but it can't compete with Man or Astroman. Few can. Today's final entry is the magnificently named "Philip K Dick in the Pet Section of a Wal Mart". Don't you want to hear that?

Naturally, being who they are, it's an instrumental. Except, wait, what's this? A fuzzy version with vocals, ripped from an old tape and put up by one of the band themeselves. They've lost the DAT master because of course they have.

We're lucky to have even this barely audible fragment and happily the lyrics are in the description. It really is about running into the visionary author in the animal foodstuffs section of a supermarket: "I was startled by the sight Of Philip K. Dick browsing at... The Hamster Turrets". Well, you would be, wouldn't you?

So there we are. Just a skim off the top of a very deep pond. Except for one more thing. Not a song this time. It's a game.

As I was scrolling down the search results from "Philip K. Dick Music" my eye fell across this:

It's a walkthrough for a game called Californium, based on the works and ideas of the man himself. I took a quick glance and it looks intriguing. And bright. Very bright. 

I checked and it's on Steam. I still have my winnings from last year's IntPiPoMo in my Steam Wallet. As soon as I finish this post I'm off to buy it. If it's any good - and even if it's not - no doubt a post or two will follow.

And that's how we get here from there. Serendipity. All you need is a seed.